On Nov. 7, 2000, Deandra Buchanan was at home in Columbia with his stepfather, aunt and girlfriend, celebrating news that the aunt had found an apartment and was going to move into her own place.
During the celebration, Buchanan received a delivery of marijuana. After smoking, he says he began having a paranoid episode.
“I ended up smoking something that was laced and it caused me to flip out,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan became convinced the others were trying to kill him or put him in jail. He shot his stepfather, William Jefferson, his aunt, Juanita Hoffman, and his girlfriend, Angela Brown.
His two daughters, Dreisha, 2 years old, and Drejanay, six months old, were both with Brown when Buchanan shot her.
The prosecutor wanted the death penalty, and even though the jury deadlocked on whether to do it the judge sentenced him to die.
Three years later, the Missouri Supreme Court changed his sentence to life in prison without parole, which should have been great news. But in reality, for more than 20 years it’s blocked him from seeking relief that could allow him to get out of prison.
That’s why on Monday, Boone County Circuit Judge Jeff Harris will hold the first hearing on Buchanan’s motion seeking to reopen his original criminal case. The case review hearing is a routine but essential step toward determining whether Buchanan should have been present in court when his new sentence was imposed.
Neither the Supreme Court nor the trial judge, Boone County Circuit Judge Gene Hamilton, pronounced the new sentence in his presence.
While there is a statute allowing the Supreme Court to make the change on its own, other statutes and court precedent require felony sentencing to prison to be done with the defendant present.
“I was never legally sentenced,” Buchanan said in a recent interview at the Jefferson City Corrections Center.
The failure to sentence him in person is a denial of his rights under Missouri law, public defender Tyler Coyle wrote in the motion to reopen the case.
“Mr. Buchanan has a due process right to be personally present at the time of the resentencing hearing,” Coyle wrote.
The new sentence imposed in 2003 by the high court is noted in the docket of Buchanan’s case.
“The resentencing itself could only lead to the life without parole sentence, but then the resentencing opens the door for the post-conviction relief motion that he’s never gotten a chance to argue on the merits,” Coyle said in an interview.
The case is testing a question that has never been decided by a Missouri court, said Joe Welling, an adjunct professor at St. Louis University Law School who teaches a seminar on death penalty law.
“It’s very fascinating,” Welling said. “If I had to predict what would happen with this motion, the first thing I would say is the trial court is going to say we no longer have jurisdiction over this case that left us a long, long time ago, like 10 days after they finalized their sentence.”
That result, Coyle said, would lead to an appeal and, ultimately, the Supreme Court ruling on how it handled the case in 2003.
“We’ll get a ruling, and then our options, if he rules against us, would either be to appeal or file a writ,” Coyle said.
Unheard defense
During his 23 years in state custody, Buchanan has tried several times to initiate court cases to review his 2002 conviction for first degree murder.
Usually acting as his own attorney, the result was always dismissal with few actual hearings.
Buchanan doesn’t deny his guilt. He spoke at length about his case in an episode of the Netflix series “I am a Killer.”
“We can never change the fact that my family members lost their lives, my girl, my friend, was shot,” Buchanan said. “You can’t put time on that.”
But he claims he has no memory of the crime.
“I finally came to, and I asked the lady, she was like, ‘Do you know what you are here for?’” Buchanan said. “And I was like, no, what happened? And she told me, and tears came down my face.”
Buchanan believes the marijuana he smoked was laced with PCP, a hallucinogenic drug also called angel dust that can cause paranoid, dissociative episodes, with profuse sweating and convulsions at high doses.
“According to the police report, I was sweating so hard, profusely sweating, to where they had to keep using my shirt to wipe the mucus coming out of my nose and my mouth,” Buchanan said.
No blood or urine tests were done while Buchanan was held and interrogated. He said sweat was extracted from his clothing and tested positive for PCP, but motions for a continuance for additional tests were denied.
The circumstances of the killings, Buchanan said, mean he should have been charged with second degree murder because he was incapable of the deliberation required by law.
The penalty for second degree murder includes a possibility of parole.
He credits his perseverance in efforts to change his sentence to encouragement from his grandfather.
His grandfather, a minister, advised him to study the law.
“He said nothing’s perfect, according to Scripture, about man, so how can man-made laws govern your situation ever be perfect?” Buchanan said. “And I was like, wow. So a light bulb came on at that moment, and it never, ever has went off. It only has gotten brighter.”
Death penalty law
Missouri has eight men on death row awaiting execution.
To be placed there, each went through a two-part trial. In the first, a jury had to unanimously find that a defendant is guilty of killing another person after deliberation.
Then, following additional testimony and argument, the jury must find unanimously that the crime fits into one of 17 statutory aggravators that include being “outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman,” perpetrated to gain money, silence a witness or being part of gang activity.
A jury also looks for mitigating factors that argue against death.
The bifurcated trial is the result of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 1970s intended to prevent arbitrary and disproportional penalties, Welling said.
“There’s just no way to explain why these few people got death, and all these other people with what looks like the same type of cases didn’t,” Welling said.
One of the key rulings defining legal standards for a death penalty is the 2002 decision in Ring v Arizona. The court decided that when a jury cannot agree on death, and makes no report on whether it found aggravating circumstances that allow a death penalty, it cannot be imposed.
Every death penalty case in Missouri is automatically sent to the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal, where the penalty is reviewed for proportionality and constitutionality.
Buchanan is one of 10 men on death row in Missouri who had their sentences changed to life in prison without parole because their original sentence was unconstitutional as a result of the Ring decision.
From 2003 until 2019, judges were unable to impose a death penalty in Missouri if the jury deadlocked on punishment. That changed when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that if a jury unanimously found aggravators to be present, a judge could impose death without a unanimous recommendation for the punishment from the jury.
“We’re very much an outlier,” Welling said. “Right now, in the majority of capital states, if the jury can’t decide, it’s automatically life.”
This year, state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Arnold, filed a bill to require a unanimous recommendation for a death penalty from juries for the sentence to be imposed. She got the bill to the Senate floor for debate, but it stalled and she said it is dead for the year.
“A lot of people feel very strongly about the death penalty, obviously,” Coleman said. “Whether you’re in favor of or opposed to the death penalty, it’s a really common sense proposition that a jury of your peers should find you guilty and one person shouldn’t have the ability to decide whether you live and die on behalf of the state.”
There are other men in custody in Missouri who had their sentence changed and have not raised the issues Buchanan is asking the court to consider.
“I imagine that most people who got their death sentence converted to life without parole never challenge that any further, because they’re happy with that result,” Coyle said. “But Buchanan feels that even life without parole is too much, because he feels that the involuntary intoxication defense is more important.”
Buchanan’s goal
Buchanan, who is 51, knows that he has many more years in prison ahead of him.
He said he works to help other inmates as part of a peer support program.
“We hold staff accountable in a professional way,” Buchanan said. “We hold prisoners accountable in a professional way. We bridge the gap as institutional peer support.”
If he gets the immediate relief he is seeking, he will get a chance to argue in post-conviction hearings that he was involuntarily intoxicated by PCP at the time of the murders.
That could get him a new trial.
“Marijuana at the time was not a legal substance,” Buchanan said. But now that they passed the initiative on the ballot, and they enacted this new law in Missouri to legalize recreational marijuana, they made it retroactive. So now the evidence in my case will be considered to be legal, to be able to be used right to show this is how this got in my system.”
There is no likelihood that he could receive the death penalty again because that sentence was overturned for the first case, Coyle said.
The hopes are slim.
Buchanan knows he should not expect to ever be released, but thinks of how he could help his six children and five grandchildren.
“I can’t say I deserve parole,” Buchanan said. “I can’t sit there and tell you that, but I look at it like one day, I hope God can touch the people to allow me to be in a position to have parole so I can, you know, have a better relationship with all my children.”
